Case Number 16486

LICENCE TO KILL (BLU-RAY)

The Charge

Opening Statement

The second greatest James Bond film ever made finally hits the next
generation of optical media, and I defy you to find a better looking drawer full
of killer maggots.

Facts of the Case

Timothy Dalton is James Bond. If you have any issue with that, he will
destroy you. After enjoying a wonderful wedding with his CIA BFF Felix, Bond is
off to the top-secret next assignment when a homicidal druglord named Sanchez
(Robert Davi) breaks out of prison and kills Felix's wife and feeds him to a
shark. This rubs James Bond the wrong way and he promptly starts killing people
until, by mere process of elimination, he ends up face to face with Sanchez, who
he sets on fire but not before driving a semi truck sideways.

The Evidence

Licence to Kill is the cat's pajamas and only falls short of Casino
Royale in terms of 007 greatness. Bold words, sure, but as Timothy Dalton
would say "Go screw yourself." Before Daniel Craig blew everyone's skirt up with
his tough, gritty interpretation of James Bond, T-Dalt was dropping a-holes into
an electric eel aquarium and shooting them in the solar plexus with a harpoon
gun.

Here was a Bond movie that reveled in the excesses of the late '80s action
movie movement, building up a body count that would challenge Titanic,
redefining what an id-driven Alpha male can do when he's super pissed-off and
has access to unlicensed scuba equipment, introducing us to the acting prowess
of a young Talisa Soto, who would go on to stun the world with her star-making
turn as Princess Kitana in Mortal Kombat and bestowing upon us a
legendary performance by Wayne Newton that is still talked about to this day by
Wayne Newton.

More importantly the death scenes were the greatest in the franchise, which
I will now rank in ascending order:

5. Maggot-boy and Electric Eel man We'll group these two guys
together and call it the "Seafood Special." Bond, infiltrating Krest's ocean zoo
front, introduces these two hapless security guards who were probably just
looking for some extra spending money to excruciatingly painful deaths, one by
electrocution the other by a mixture of suffocation and slow biting from
thousands of maggots.

4. Massive shark trauma When Bond tracks down the crooked DEA
agent who sprung Sanchez, he tosses him in a shark tank and looks down coldly
and approvingly as the shark eats him to death.

3. Forklift impalement There's some guy named Heller and he
sells Stinger rockets to Sanchez and then tries to double-cross him and he ends
up rammed onto a forklift. "Looks like he came to a dead end," says Bond gazing
at the bloody carnage and, I presume, struggling to stifle back an inappropriate
laugh.

2. Benicio del Toro reduced to a fine red mist Before he was
making high-concept Steven Soderbergh morality pictures, del Toro was a punk
sidekick who met a brutally painful end by slowly falling through a cocaine
grinder. How painful? He was still screaming long after his skull went
through.

1. Decompression It's tempting to go with the Final Bad Guy
Death, the Sanchez flambé, but there is no way you can look past Krest, the
evil drugrunning sea captain. Suspected of stealing drug money, Krest is thrown
into a decompression tank by Sanchez and proceeds to explode. We even see his
stupid head inflate to the size of a beach ball with his eyes bugging out and
then POP! the glass window is coated in pasty red organic matter. That,
my friends, is how you push a PG-13 rating to the brink.

Onto the question at hand: is this high-def version of Licence to
Kill worth getting? If you don't own it on any spinning disc yet, then this
is an easy call. Buy it and love it as I have. If you've got one of the nifty
ultimate edition discs, then it's a tougher choice. There's no doubting that the
picture quality is given a facelift and it's easy to see the improvement. Even
for an older release, the video (2.35:1 widescreen) is sharp and will satisfy if
you're after a full-bodied, higher resolution treatment. The ultimate edition
was so stellar, however, that the yardage between that tech and the Blu-ray
isn't humongous. It's there -- this is definitely the best Licence to
Kill has ever looked -- but I'm going to stop short of saying the makeover
is drastic enough to mandate a re-purchase, even taking the updated, crisp 5.1
DTS-HD Master Audio mix (which is quite good). Perhaps if there were HD-specific
extras tossed in, I might change my mind, but the bonus materials are merely
imported from the ultimate edition. They're great -- commentary from director
John Glen, Michael Wilson and the crew, deleted scenes, featurettes spotlighting
the set, production design and the stunt trucks, a making-of documentary and a
pair of music videos -- but you've seen it all before.

Closing Statement

I love this movie dearly and will defend the bodaciousness of T-Dalt until
the day I die and the Blu-ray serves up noticeable upgrades to the sound and
video -- but the enhancements aren't quite enough to push for a double-dip if
you've got the ultimate edition already on the shelf.